The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  MacDonell then showed me a close-up picture of the gouge. “Look at that. Unless someone took a knife and deliberately carved a large chunk out of the wood, that has to be a ricochet mark, especially as there’s a bullet hole in the glass door behind it. So we know that Jean is telling the truth about the first shot.”

  MacDonell continued his argument. “And what does Jean say next? She says Tarnower went to the bathroom to check his hand wound, then returned with a towel around it, grabbed the gun from her, and sat on the bed while he telephoned the housekeeper.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Was there a blood trail on the carpet? That would show us whether he was wounded only in the hand—or had two other massive wounds as the prosecution said.”

  MacDonell looked through his pictures and came up with a police photo of the carpet at the time of the crime that I had not seen published. I sighed. The picture showed a single trail of blood droplets, as I had thought should be present if Harris was telling the truth. “But the blood trail isn’t the only evidence,” MacDonell said. “There was hydrolized blood on the mattress where Tarnower sat, after he returned from the bathroom.”

  Hydrolized blood is blood mixed with water. It indicated that Tarnower had washed his hand in the bathroom. “Furthermore, I examined the mattress for bloodstains,” MacDonell continued. “The other side of the bed, nearer the bathroom, had a cloth-on-cloth bloodstain from the towel he tossed there. You see, it all fits with her story of the hand wound.

  “And there’s also a psychological factor which makes the prosecution scenario ridiculous,” he said. “If Jean had stood in front of Tarnower, deliberately firing away to kill him, wouldn’t he have run out of the room yelling, ‘She’s trying to murder me,’ rather than walking to the bathroom and back?”

  He shook his head. “Now we come to the climax, the struggle that Jean says took place on the bed, and the shots she fired. She says she remembers the sound of only one shot—and the jury, and everyone else, says, ‘Oh yes? If there really was a struggle, you pulled the trigger three times!’”

  MacDonell leaned over and said, almost confidentially, “But I conducted a ballistics test of my own in police headquarters—and it proved Jean was right when she said she didn’t remember more than one shot.”

  He told me he had fired the gun on the police pistol range. “The police thought I was testing discharge distance. But what I was doing was firing each shell twice to see if Harris had told the truth.

  “You see, her story was that after the struggle on the bed when Tarnower was shot, she ran around the bed, placed the gun to her temple to kill herself, pulled the trigger, and it clicked. The reason it clicked is that Jean had loaded only five bullets into the six chambers. One of the chambers was empty. If it hadn’t been, she would have been dead when she pulled the trigger.” He paused. “She then held the gun out to test it, and the fifth bullet fired into the headboard behind the bed. What did she do next? According to her, she kept pressing the trigger, each time hearing a click. Do you see now why I fired each shell twice on the police range?”

  “Yes,” I said. “To prove she had kept pulling the trigger and thereby prove she really didn’t know she had fired all those shots before, just as she later told the jury.”

  “Right,” MacDonell said. “You can tell when a shell has been struck twice. When a bullet is fired, the gases from the explosion cause the back of the shell to rise. But the second fall of the hammer flattens out the back of the shell in a distinctive manner. That’s how I could tell Jean Harris kept squeezing the trigger, and therefore didn’t know she had fired all those shots on the bed. It’s scientific proof that she remembered only one shot. She thought there were still bullets in the gun!

  “So from first to last her story checked out, scientifically, ballistically, psychologically, and every other way including logically,” MacDonell said. “And there are other clues. Here’s something no one brought out at the trial. It’s only a small clue, but again it builds up her credibility.” He showed me a picture of the back of Tarnower’s pajama top. “Where’s the bullet hole in the shoulder?” he asked. I looked at the picture and saw that the collar flap of the pajama top that covered the bullet hole in the shoulder revealed no hole of its own. “You won’t find it because the flap was up when the bullet struck,” MacDonell said. “And why was his collar flap up? Because he was involved in a struggle, as Jean said.”

  That evening MacDonell gave a slide presentation of the Jean Harris case for me and some of his friends, in which he explained many of the points he had made to me earlier. The next morning, as I was leaving, he made one final and very intriguing statement. “I know of a test Jean took,” he said. “She passed it with flying colors. But it wasn’t admissible in court.”

  Then he added, mysteriously, “There’s a tape recording of that test in existence.”

  Was he talking about a lie detector test that Jean Harris had taken—and passed? MacDonell wouldn’t tell me, but if that is what he meant, why the test is still secret mystified me.

  6

  A few months after my visit with MacDonell, I discovered that the Tarnower bedroom had been preserved, and I would be allowed to see it. There I knew I would be able to check in person the two items of forensic evidence which I had decided earlier would be litmus tests of Harris’s honesty.

  1. The trail of blood to the bathroom. Was it a thin trail from a hand wound? If it was, Harris’s story would be confirmed. The police photo in MacDonell’s possession showed that it was, but from long experience as a coroner I knew that pictures often lie, because of the camera angle or the lighting.

  2. The gouge in the wooden floor of the balcony. I was concerned about it because in my opinion a bullet should not have ricocheted at all from such a floor but would have bored straight through the wood. If the gouge was not that of a bullet, then the prosecution, not Harris, was right.

  When at last I found myself in the bedroom of Tarnower’s former house, I went directly to the foot of the twin beds where Harris said she had stood when that famous first shot was fired. I turned to look through the glass doors that opened onto the balcony, and admired the splendid view. The pond, larger than I had imagined, and the willow trees were graceful ornaments to the estate. At my shoulder, Valerie Westheimer murmured, “That tree over there.” She pointed to a tall willow. “Jean Harris said when she visited, ‘That was Hy’s favorite tree. I’m so glad you saved it.’ She was so in love with that man.”

  But I was concentrating not on love but on a gouge in the balcony floor outside. I began to open the glass door to the balcony, but Mrs. Westheimer stopped me. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you not to go out on the balcony.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s dangerous. We’re going to have to rebuild the balcony, because the wood is rotten.”

  Rotting wood! I crouched behind the glass door and looked at the gouge. That explained the mystery to me. I knew from experience that if a bullet strikes rotting wood it will not bore through cleanly, as it normally does. Instead the wood will break off in chunks—and cause just such a gouge as I was seeing. That meant MacDonell’s test was right, and the prosecution was wrong about that first shot. It had been fired, as Harris claimed, when Tarnower stopped her from trying to commit suicide at the foot of the bed.

  I next went toward Tarnower’s bathroom to look for the trail of blood on the carpet. There was no carpet. It was gone: one important piece of evidence in the case that had not been preserved, I thought sadly. When I asked Mrs. Westheimer about it, she said she had removed the carpet because of the blood on it. “How much blood was on the carpet?” I said. “A pool?”

  “Oh no,” she said, “not much blood at all. Just a few drops.”

  Once again the evidence confirmed Harris’s story.

  I was also curious about the last shot and went to the far side of the bed, where Harris said she had fired it. According to her, she had stood at the bedside near the headboard after Tarnower wa
s shot, placed the gun to her head to kill herself, and heard a click. Then she held the gun out to test it, pulled the trigger, and the gun fired, sending a bullet into the cabinet built into the headboard.

  At the trial the prosecution said that the wild shot into the cabinet had not occurred that way; instead it happened earlier when Tarnower “brushed” the gun as he passed Harris who was standing at the foot of the bed. But as I examined the cabinet, I saw something strange. There were two gouges, not one. One was in the front corner of the headboard, the other was in the back of the cabinet inside it, five inches to the side. The angle between the two marks showed precisely—and with no other explanation—that Harris had stood at the very spot she said she was standing when she fired the gun. The prosecution, according to the Westheimers, had not inspected the room, relying instead on the earlier police photos of the scene. So perhaps they were unaware of the two gouges in the headboard when they claimed the shot originated from the other side of the bed, and at its foot. But here was further evidence that Harris’s story was true.

  Examining the storage cabinets behind the headboard, Mrs. Westheimer and I then found the collages Jean Harris had made for her lover. And, my investigation complete, I left this house where one night, four years before, a fifty-six-year-old woman in love, and despair, had come bearing flowers, and a gun.

  7

  Dr. Robert E. Litman is co-director and chief psychiatrist of the famous Suicide Prevention Center in Los Angeles. I first worked with him on the Marilyn Monroe case in 1962, and I don’t believe anyone in the world knows more about the psychology and circumstances of potential suicides than he. I was troubled by the fact that Jean Harris had not remembered firing three shots, so I asked Dr. Litman about the case. I told him that Harris remembered firing only one shot in the struggle on the bed. And that one shot, she believed, was fired when the muzzle was pointed at her own stomach. Was it possible that she couldn’t remember the two other shots?

  Dr. Litman said it was indeed possible. “Often in police cases involving gunfire,” he told me, “the trained officer cannot remember the number of shots he fired in the incident. That’s because of shock, and here there was a second factor. When Jean Harris pulled the trigger the first time, she expected the shot to be fatal to her. She was psychologically prepared for death, and when it didn’t happen her mind ceased to function, and all she remembers is that first shot which should have brought her death.”

  Thus all of the pieces of the case seemed to fit together. Forensic evidence from the bullet wounds to the lone blood trail to the bullet gouges in the balcony and the headboard revealed that Jean Harris told the truth about the events of that night from beginning to end. MacDonell’s test in the ballistics laboratory showed she really hadn’t remembered firing all of those shots, and Dr. Litman’s psychological experience agreed with him.

  A struggle for the gun obviously did occur, and if it did, the killing of Dr. Herman Tarnower could have been accidental, as I believe it was. My research into the actual forensic facts has given me faith in Jean Harris’s credibility. I believe she was at all times trying to commit suicide and Tarnower misdirected the gun in the struggle. Therefore, in my opinion, a grievous miscarriage of justice was done in that courtroom, and Jean Harris should not be serving fifteen years in prison for second-degree murder.

  And she would not be if she and Tarnower had heeded the unconscious warning for both of them that Jean Harris had written on her last New Year’s collage to “Hy.” Not only “HOW YOU CAN USE LOVE TO LIVE LONGER,” but elsewhere on the collage:

  LOVE—THE SECRET OF HEALTH, HAPPINESS AND LONG LIFE.

  THE OTHER SIDE OF FATAL VISION

  The Jeffrey MacDonald Case

  1

  Jeffrey MacDonald was the son of whom many mothers and fathers might be proud: intelligent, ambitious, and the most popular boy in school. Reaching adulthood, he became a brilliant, hard-working doctor respected by his colleagues and revered by his patients; a patriot who chose for his obligatory military service the toughest division in the U.S. Army, the Green Berets; a father beloved of his wife, Colette, and their two daughters, Kimberly, 5, and Kristen, 2.

  And yet this praiseworthy young man, on one dark night in February 1970, allegedly smashed the skull of his pregnant wife several times with a club, and stabbed her twenty-one times with an icepick; clubbed his daughter Kimberly with three blows, then stabbed her no fewer than ten times; and, finally, placed his little blond child, Kristen, across his lap, knifed her seventeen times, and drove an icepick into her tiny body fifteen times.

  Could MacDonald have done this? Or was that monstrous butchery executed, as MacDonald has always claimed, by a “hippie” cult with clubs and knives, one of whom scrawled a word in blood—“pig”—across the headboard of his bed?

  I had seen that word, “pig,” in blood less than a year before the MacDonald tragedy when, as Chief Medical Examiner of Los Angeles County, I investigated the scene of the gruesome murders at 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, where the beautiful actress Sharon Tate and three of her friends had been murdered by the so-called Manson “family.” Now, according to the first news reports from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, an almost identical cult murder had occurred only months later.

  I was curious about the case because of its Manson connection—and even more so when later news reports stated that Army authorities now believed that MacDonald himself had murdered his family. The charge was that he had first killed his daughter Kimberly; then, inspired by an Esquire magazine article describing the Manson murders, he killed his wife and their other daughter, attempting to cover up his monstrous crime by faking a similar hippie-cult assault.

  I thought that this charge, if true, would be easy enough to prove. Because of my coroner’s investigation of the evidence at the Manson crime scene, I knew, perhaps better than anyone else, how difficult such faking would be. In my opinion, MacDonald would have needed a whole shopping list of evidentiary items on that night to create all the false forensic evidence which would indicate that intruders had been present. When he was acquitted of the charge, I assumed that he was indeed innocent of any crime. Forensic evidence found at the scene had substantiated his version of the events of that terrible night. Yet nine years later he was tried and convicted for the brutal murders of his wife and children. And the proof against him was the same forensic evidence that had led to his earlier acquittal.

  How was that possible, I wondered? Forensic evidence can often be misinterpreted or misunderstood. But can it lie? In the strange and haunting case of Jeffrey MacDonald, it seemed to me that forensic science itself was on trial.

  2

  On February 16, 1970, rain slanted steeply in the night outside the house in which Lieutenant John Milne, a helicopter pilot, sat working contentedly on a model airplane. Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the largest Army base in the United States, had been inundated with the downpour for hours. But near midnight it eased and Milne opened a window to vent the smell of the glue he was using.

  A few minutes later, voices outside his house attracted his attention. Milne went to the back door, “looked out and three people were standing ten or fifteen feet from me, going up the sidewalk. These three individuals were wearing white sheets, and I specifically saw the center individual to be a girl and two males on either side, and they were all carrying candles.”

  When the three reached the end of his building, they turned left into a walkway that led almost directly to the side bedroom of the house at 544 Castle Drive in which Green Beret Captain Jeffrey MacDonald, his wife and two small children lived.

  At 3:45 A.M., SP4 Kenneth Mica, Company A, 503rd Military Police Battalion, was driving through the rain in his jeep toward 544 Castle Drive in response to a call of “trouble.” At the intersection of Honeycutt Boulevard and North Lucas Street, Mica looked through the plastic side window of his jeep and saw a young woman standing on the corner. What was a woman doing at that intersection at that time of night
? he wondered. He estimated her age to be in the twenties and noted that she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, which looked “floppy.”

  Mica drove on, and when he arrived at the house at 544 Castle Drive he found three MP vehicles already there. Together with the other MPs, he made a futile attempt to gain entrance through the front door, which was locked. They went to the back door and found it open. They entered the house, passing through a utility room, then walked into the master bedroom—and a scene of madness.

  A young woman in bloody pajamas was lying on her back on the floor, her head bloodied and crushed. A man, wearing only pajama bottoms, lay on his stomach on top of the woman’s left shoulder. On the headboard of the bed, a word was scrawled in human blood: “pig.” Both of the people on the floor appeared dead, but when Mica crouched beside them he saw that the man was still breathing. Mica turned him over and heard him gasp, “Check my kids. How are my kids?”

  Mica ran down the hallway, turning his flashlight onto the beds of two children in their separate bedrooms. Blood all over. He switched on the lights in the room of the younger child, Kristen. A large stuffed animal with comic eyes stared incongruously at the face of the dead little girl from inches away. Mica checked and saw that her body was bloody from wounds. In the bedroom across the hall, the body of the older child, Kimberly, was in even worse condition. Her head had been crushed, in addition to the stab wounds inflicted on her body.

  Mica, shaken, continued down the hallway of this house of horror to the living room. There he saw an overturned coffee table, with magazines strewn across the floor. Back in the master bedroom, Mica found that MacDonald had fainted, so he gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When MacDonald awakened, his teeth were chattering. Twice more he lost consciousness and Mica revived him. But in his waking moments, MacDonald told Mica through chattering teeth, “I can’t breathe, I need a chest tube…. How are my kids? Check my wife…. I heard my kids crying. I tried to feel my wife’s pulse and I couldn’t find it.…. They kept saying, ‘Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.’”